BOOK REVIEWS

Der vom norwegischen Ministerium für Bildung und Forschung anläßlich des 200. Geburtstags von Nils Henrik Abel initiierte jährliche Preis hat die Qualität eines mathematischen Nobelpreises, dessen bisherige Preisträger auch dank hervorragender Jury-Entscheidungen innerhalb der Mathematik alle unbestritten höchst anerkannt sind. Dieser Band mit Interviews mit den Abelpreisträgern von 2003 bis 2016 ergänzt durch ein imaginäres Interview mit Abel bereichert jede Bibliothek. Es ist zu hoffen, daß nach der Lektüre viele Mathematiklehrer ein richtigeres Bild der Mathematik vermitteln. Auch mathematisch Fernen oder Uninteressierten werden hier aus erster Hand faszinierende Einblicke in kreative Prozesse schöpferischer Genies von verschiedenster Art und Charakter bei der Lösung schwieriger und bedeutender Probleme aus vielen produktivenmathematischen Forschungsdisziplinen gegeben. Immer wieder eröffnen sich neue Lösungswege durch oft „zufällig” gefundene, überraschende Methoden und strukturelle Einsichten aus anderen Disziplinen. Entscheidungsträger können hier wertvolle Anregungen für forschungspolitisch gute Beschlüsse für richtige Förderungen gewinnen. Mathematische Methoden und Ergebnisse werden ja zunehmend wichtiger für fast alle zukunftsträchtigen Gebiete. Es ist wertvoll, der Jugend bedeutende Vorbilder zu geben. Erfreulich ist, daß sich z.B. in Norwegen Schulklassen drängen,Abelpreisträgern vorgestellt zuwerden. Bei der Lektüre zeigt sich auch der bedeutendeEinfluß großer Forscherpersönlichkeiten für die der Abelpreis zu spät kam, wie z.B. des in Österreich geborenen Emil Artin, Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Grothendieck, von Neumann, Weil, Weyl, u.v.a. Mit dem Courant-Institut sind ja vier Abelpreisträger eng verbunden. Richard Courant, von den Nazis aus Göttingen vertrieben, förderte insbesondere junge Mathematiker. Er bewahrte die Einheit zwischen reiner und angewandter Mathematik. Seine Frau, Tocher des angewandten Matematikers Runge war Musikerin, er selbst auch Pianist, Peter Lax sein Schwiegersohn.Vielsagend ist auch, daßPierreDeligne einenTeil seinesPreises an das IHES in Paris, IAS in Princeton, an das HSE in Moskau und an eine Stiftung des russischen PhilantropenDmitry Zimin überwies.Mikhail Gromov, ein typisch russisches, originellesGeniemit neuen geometrisch-intuitiven Einsichten (einDurchbruch gelang ihm nach einer Lektüre mit einer Behauptung über eine erstaunliche Querverbindung zwischen verschiedenen Disziplinen, Zitat: “I couldn’t understand what the two had in common. I was looking in his book and in articles of these people but I couldn’t under-

including the anchoring of heavy industry in important economic associations with strong political power (p. 209-213). After the 1950s, a convergence in the number of large companies and their scale ensued, but Britain continued to hold a slight lead by 1989 (p. 66). Even clear German success stories such as in chemicals are relativized. Although not as dynamic as the Big Three in Germany (Hoechst, Bayer, BASF), before 1914 British chemical firms such as Brunner Mond & Co. and Lever Brothers were as large and as profitable as their German counterparts (pp. 11, 80).
Surprisingly, historians have not utilized the most obvious symbol of business "success" to compare performance. In general, British companies consistently achieved higher profits and higher rates of return than their counterparts in France or Germany. Britain, moreover, had a wide array of large companies in consumer goods, extractive, and financial businesses, whose profits often dwarfed German and French companies. Only French banks came closest to posting comparable levels of profits relative to British or German companies. Even by the early 1970s, the average profit of the top ten British industrial companies was $155.8 million, substantially higher than the $62.7 million of the German top ten and $48.2 million of the French top ten (pp. 84-5). Germans were again strongest in heavy industry, chemical, and electrical industries, but their profit levels should not be exaggerated. To stay with a particularly heralded German success story, before 1914 profit levels between British and German chemical firms were roughly equal. In the mid-1920s, both ICI and the Lever Brothers posted over £5 million in profits as did IG Farben. By the 1950s, ICI earned over three times as much as Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst put together; the latter were more comparable to French firms such as Rhone-Poulence or Saint-Gobain. Even by the early 1970s, ICI earned two-thirds the profit levels of the German Big Three combined, but slightly more than just one of the Big Three by the late 1980s.
Defined as the rate of return on shareholder equity, British firms remained the most profitable across the entire century (p. 87). Moreover, this alleged focus on short-term profits did not impede long-term growth or the survival of British companies. In fact, leading British companies survived longer and in greater numbers than their French or German counterparts: of those sample companies that remained large for eighty years or more, 24 were British, 9 were French, and 10 were German (p. 117). Not surprisingly, those surviving firms reflected the traditional sectoral strengths of each nation: British diversity across the board, French strength in banking and services, German concentrations in banking, heavy industry, electrical engineering, and chemicals. These reevaluations tend to place big business performance more in line with general economic (GDP) trends among the three nations.
In the second half of the book, Cassis turns to questions of business leadership and social status. This section of the book brings together the latest secondary research about European big business. These discussions tend to invoke more questions, rather than answers. The last section on the sociopolitical status of business elites is the least satisfying part of the book as it is more descriptive than analytical. Cassis, however, doesn't claim to provide more than a sketch.
Cassis argues that there was no direct correlation between "family capitalism" and business performance. Based on his sample of chairmen (they were all men) and managing directors, Cassis finds weak evidence that British businessmen in his sample had a higher rate of family inheritance than Germans or French. French business leaders, moreover, were most likely to have the highest level of education, even in science and engineering-more so than the Germans. Yet family capitalism defined by those at the top is not quite Chandler's "personal capitalism," which highlights the managerial hierarchy. The importance of science and engineering, or even the science of administration at which the French excelled, would play itself out more among the host of middle managers, about whom we know little. Cassis himself finds that each country's business leaders tended to exhibit a distinct professional path to the top: through the partnership in Britain, the civil service in France, or the corporate ladder in Germany (p. 148). His own evidence suggests that Germans established more extensive corporate hierarchies earlier than the British or French. We still need better research on middle management, rather than just those at the top (p. 165-6).
Following the latest research on banking, Cassis argues that British and French bankers on company boards of directors had more influence than Germans-except if a German banker chaired the supervisory board. Finance played the strongest role in Britain (p. 236). Given the wealth of theoretical treatises about banks and capital markets, information asymmetry, and moral hazards, what should we make of these findings? If the power of German banks was "less marked than is often assumed" and there is "no evidence to suggest that industrial success or failure in any of the three countries had much to do with the role played by the banks" (p.

185), then how do national institutional differences in capital markets matter?
Similarly, what difference do the various social and political connections make for business performance? Cassis finds that British aristocracy "remained the grandest in Europe" (p. 196) and businessmen there were the most integrated with the old elite. Yet, according to Cassis's standards, British business continued to excel. An overwhelming amount (89 percent) of French businessmen lived in Paris, fully integrated into the country's elite. Ironically, the Germans remained the most "bourgeois" and most provincial. Germany's strongest political association lay with heavy industry in the Ruhr. How much did these patterns of social and political contacts actually help make big business successful a la Krupp or Vickers or Schneider? This question may be particularly important for a colonial company such as De Beers, which had the highest profits before 1914. Cassis tends to think in the reverse, that economic power led to greater sociopolitical influence. What are the long-term economic and social effects of political influence by a dominating core of City bankers in London, a Parisian business elite in Paris, or a more decentralized business elite in the Ruhr and Berlin (p. 213)?
Cassis also says little about religion or culture. Intriguingly, nearly twenty percent of German business leaders, especially in banking, were Jewish compared to only five percent in Britain (p. 221). How do we explain such dramatic differences? In his discussion about banking, he notes that debates about the role of banking "derive from a different conception of what banks should do; and from a different perception of the way banks have performed their duties" (p. 177). Do these different "conceptions" and "perceptions" shape the actions of business itself? Finally, after thoroughly rejecting "British decline" in all of its manifestations, one begins to wonder why the century-long discourse about decline ever arose.
Hints of an answer are strewn throughout the book, but Cassis does not sew them together. But if Cassis wants us to ask new questions instead of posing the old, wrong ones, he has succeeded. Readers of colonial economic and social history will, by now, be familiar with the vigorous debate on the capitalist transformation that has taken place on both sides of the Atlantic for the last thirty years. The debate appears to have achieved consensus on one thing, but that thing is fundamental: namely, that "the decisive part in the transition . . . to capitalism was played out in the countryside. This is certainly one of the keys to the 'mystery' of the transition, though not readily perceived when one is obsessed by the commercial and industrial manifestations of nascent capitalism" (Guy Bois in T. H. Ashton and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate [1987], 109, n. 7).